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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
At the height of modern questioning of the relevance of traditional symbols, Paul Ricoeur envisioned a reawakening to the plenitude of meaning available in symbols that would occur not through rejecting criticism but by moving through it. While many have found this vision of a “second naiveté” compelling, exemplars of it have remained few. This article proposes that insight into a contemporary reappropriation of symbols may be gained from an examination of Bede Griffiths' lifelong experience with one, Jesus Christ. Griffiths' contemplative and interreligious experience illustrate and advance the analyses of religious symbols offered by Ricoeur, Mircea Eliade, and David Tracy.
1 Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Buchanan, Emerson (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 350, 351.Google Scholar
2 For an analysis of such experience, see Panikkar, Raimundo, The Intra-religious Dialogue (New York: Paulist, 1978), 12.Google Scholar
3 Jesus Christ is characterized as a symbol in the fullest sense of the term: “religious symbols … awaken in participants an encounter with an ultimate Other at the limits of human existence” (Happel, Stephen, “Symbol” in Komonchak, Joseph, Collins, Mary, and Lane, Dermot, eds., The New Dictionary of Theology [Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987], 998Google Scholar). In correspondence with the author, Griffiths expressed his particular affinity with Karl Rahner's explanation of Jesus Christ as a “real symbol,” a full and original self-expression of being that makes being present and knowledge of it possible (Rahner, Karl, “The Theology of the Symbol” in Theological Investigations [Baltimore: Helicon, 1966], 4:221–52Google Scholar).
4 Usually said to be derived from the gospels and from Paul's injunction to “pray without ceasing,” the Jesus prayer or prayer of the heart is most prominent in Eastern Orthodox spiritualities. The prayer involves the spoken or interior repetition of “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (or a variation thereof), often coordinated with the breath. The authoritative text on this practice is the Philokalia, an eighteenth-century collection of sayings and discourses by early Eastern Church Fathers on prayer. A more popular description of the theory and effects of the Jesus prayer may be found in the anonymous The Way of the Pilgrim and its sequel, The Pilgrim Continues on His Way.
5 E.g., see Griffiths' preface to Matus, Thomas, Yoga and the Jesus Prayer Tradition: An Experiment in Faith (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist, 1984).Google Scholar
6 These talks have been published as The New Creation in Christ: Meditation and Community, ed. Kiely, Robert and Freeman, Laurence (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1994).Google Scholar
7 On the mantra as symbol and its relationship to archetypes in consciousness, Griffiths said: “It [the mantra] should focus your whole being, physically, and then psychologically, on an archetypal form. And then through that image you go beyond it to the reality. So it [the mantra] is a symbol in the exact sense. It's got a physical character, and it's got a psychological character as an archetype. And, at the same time, it's embodying the Supreme Mystery and opening up to it” (interview by the author, tape recording, Trappist, Kentucky, August 1991).
8 Griffiths, Bede, “In Jesus' Name,” The Tablet 246/7915-16 (18-25 04 1992): 498.Google Scholar See also Spink, Kathryn, A Sense of the Sacred: A Biography of Bede Griffiths (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989), 103.Google Scholar
9 Note that Griffiths was also familiar, as his talks at the John Main Seminar evince, with the forms of contemplative prayer taught by the Desert Fathers, The Cloud of Unknowing, and more recently by John Main (using maranatha as a mantra), and Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating (centering prayer).
10 Griffiths, Bede, The Golden String: An Autobiography (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1954, 1980), 11.Google Scholar
11 Griffiths' reflection upon this move to understand his awakening reveals a significant prioritizing of direct experience before ideas, anticipating the role of praxis in relation to theory. See ibid., 56.
12 Ibid., 53.
13 Ibid., 55.
14 The primary sources for Griffiths' study of symbol throughout this life were S. T. Coleridge, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Eliade, Karl Rahner, and Suzanne Langer. Regarding the origin of symbols revelatory of the sacred mystery, Griffiths was influenced by Jung's discussion of archetypes: “[A]s Jung says, symbols arise originally in the unconscious and these symbolic structures are reflections in the human psyche of eternal archetypes or patterns of reality. This is where the link between the human and the divine occurs. Naturally, the symbolic expression is largely determined by the conditioning of the individual consciousness, which varies immensely. Some have only confused images in their dreams; in a great poet or prophet the symbols may come very close to the original archetype. The archetype of “God,” for instance, can vary from the “dream-time” figures of the Australian aborigines to the figure of Krishna in the Gita or of Christ in the New Testament (letter to the author, Shantivanam, India, June 15, 1990).
15 It was during this time of exploration that Griffiths first read the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, and the Tao Te Ching, and re-encountered the New Testament.
16 Griffiths, , The Golden String, 104–5.Google Scholar
17 Spink, , A Sense of the Sacred, 103.Google Scholar
18 Bede Griffiths, “The Power of the Imagination,” photocopy of Griffiths' unpublished manuscript (1930s), 6. Compare to Griffiths' later statement that “the language of the imagination is part of the process of incarnation” (Griffiths, Bede, The Marriage of East and West: A Sequel to the Golden String [Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1982], 103Google Scholar).
19 Griffiths, Bede, “The Divine Office as a Method of Prayer,” The Life of the Spirit 6/62-63 (08–09 1951): 84.Google Scholar
20 Ibid.
21 Griffiths, , The Golden String, 186;Google ScholarGriffiths, Bede, “The Enigma of Simone Weil,” Blackfriars 34/398 (05 1953): 236.Google Scholar In other writings Griffiths reaffirms this point by reference to Aquinas's distinction between the sacramentum and the res. Griffiths later found a helpful analysis of the symbolic nature of theology in Dulles, Avery, Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985).Google Scholar
22 Griffiths, Bede, “The Priesthood and Contemplation,” Orate Fratres 25/8 (07 1951): 347–55;Google ScholarGriffiths, , The Golden String, 148.Google Scholar Griffiths' later use of the term “self-transcendence” was informed by his reading of Rahner and assumes a religious, as opposed to a cognitive, affective, or moral sense of the term.
23 Griffiths, , “The Priesthood and Contemplation,” 349.Google Scholar Cf. Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 21Google Scholar, where Griffiths speaks of how contemplative prayer begins when “the mantra … takes us into the silence of that presence [of God].”
24 Gilkey, Langdon, “Plurality and Its Theological Implications” in Hick, John and Knitter, Paul F., eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987), 47.Google Scholar
25 Griffiths, , “In Jesus' Name,” 498.Google Scholar See also Griffiths, Bede, Return to the Center (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1976), 35–38.Google Scholar
26 See the author's “Bede Griffiths as Culture Bearer: An Exploration of the Relationship between Spiritual Transformation and Cultural Change,” American Benedictine Review (forthcoming).
27 The shift from a belief that Christianity completes and fulfills all the other religions that are but approximations of the truth revealed in Christ (a form of inclusivism he referred to as the “fulfillment theory”) to the conviction that all the major religions contain unique and complementary expressions of that truth is evidence from a comparison of his articles just prior to and just after arriving in India (e.g., those collected in Christ in India: Essays toward Hindu-Christian Dialogue [Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1966, 1984]Google Scholar) to his later books, such as Return to the Center and The Marriage of East and West. In his final works, Griffiths at times expressed something close to what has been labelled a “unitive pluralism,” a position in which the various religions are seen as “interrelated and interdependent, each giving a particular and unique insight into ultimate truth and reality” (Griffiths, Bede, A New Vision of Reality: Western Science, Eastern Mysticism, and Christian Faith, ed. Edwards, Felicity [Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1990], 286;Google Scholar see also Griffiths, Bede, Universal Wisdom: A Journey through the Sacred Wisdom of the World, ed. Ropers, Roland [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994], 10Google Scholar). Picking up on the holographic model he had encountered through the “new science” of Fritjof Capra, Ken Wilber, Karl Pribram, Rupert Sheldrake, David Bohm, and others, he also characterized his position as follows: “I see the one Mystery is manifesting in all its complements, but it's totally in the all. It's not the parts come together to make the whole, it's present in all the parts. The divine Mystery is present under these limiting signs. But the whole Mystery is present everywhere. And that's why I can say that the Australian aborigine or the American Indian experiences Christ. It's not part of him, but the whole Christ is present under these limiting signs. And in the Christian tradition it-self, again it's under limiting signs. So they're all taking us to the one Christ, to the One—whatever you like to call it” (interview by the author, August 1991).
The evolution of Griffiths' attitude toward the symbols of other traditions, revealing the role that he believed symbols play in the experience of self-transcendence, is not unambiguous. His continued use of Christ-language for the Word of God and his contention that Christian symbols are unique in their historical character at times suggest a lingering inclusivism. For example, see his response to a question about a sense of superiority in his evaluation of non-Christian religions in Rajan's, JesuBede Griffiths and Sannyasa (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corp., 1989), 246–47.Google Scholar
For a clear analysis of the difficulties posed for Christian theologians by the dialogue with other religions, see Gilkey, “Plurality and Its Theological Implication,” in which he discusses the thesis that Christian symbols, like those of other major religions, constitute “a relative manifestation of absolute meaning” (49)—an expression designed to speak to the “creative paradox” posed by interreligious dialogue with which Griffiths also wrestles. It is interesting that Griffiths was familiar with this same thesis of the “relatively absolute” from the writing of Nasr, Seyyed Hossein [Knowledge and the Sacred [New York: Crossroad, 1981], 294–98)Google Scholar and accepted it as a resolution of apparent inconsistencies in his own position on non-Christian symbols (conversation with the author, tape recording, Waitsfield, Vermont, August 1992).
28 Griffiths, Bede, “Symbolism and Cult” in Indian Culture and the Fullness of Christ (Madras: Madras Cultural Academy, 1957), 60.Google Scholar
29 Griffiths, , Return to the Center, 57;Google Scholar see also 87.
30 Griffiths, , “In Jesus' Name,” 498.Google Scholar See also Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 22–23Google Scholar, and Teasdale, Wayne, “Interview with a Spiritual Master: The Trinity” (Shantivanam, India, 12 1986)Google Scholar, Living Prayer 21/3 (05–06 1988): 25.Google Scholar Griffiths was thus hesitant to agree with Rahner's belief that the humanity of Christ constituted a real symbol, a self-expression of the divine being that need not and could not be transcended (conversation with the author, August 1991).
31 Griffiths, Bede, “The Mystical Dimension in Theology,” Indian Theological Studies 14 (1977): 243;Google Scholar cf. Griffiths, , The Marriage of East and West, 178–79.Google Scholar Griffiths' claim here that the experience of the unconditioned is both beyond all symbols and yet conditioned by them is based in an anthropology derived from Paul. Every human being is an integral whole comprised of body, mind or soul, and spirit. As a body and mind, any person experiences the sacred mystery in a way that is conditioned by physical and mental factors. But in self-transcendence, the unconditioned in each person (the spirit) may directly encounter the ultimate unconditioned Reality (the Spirit) unmediated by physical and mental factors, including symbol. One may then say that the experience of the sacred mystery is both mediated and unmediated. Cf. Griffiths' response to Kant (pp. 218-19 above).
32 Griffiths, , “The Mystical Dimension in Theology,” 244;Google Scholar cf. 231, 242. See also his Return to the Center, 26, 38, and The Marriage of East and West, 42.
33 Griffiths relates contemplation and dying in his account of the Jesus prayer as follows: “[Contemplation] is something that comes when we let go. We have to abandon everything—all words, thoughts, hopes, fears, all attachment to ourselves or to any earthly thing, and let the divine mystery take possession of our lives. It feels like death and is a sort of dying. It is encountering the darkness, the abyss, the void” (“In Jesus' Name,” 499). For his reflection on Jesus' cry on the cross, see The New Creation in Christ, 105.
34 See Dupré, Louis, The Other Dimension: A Search for the Meaning of Religious Attitudes (New York: Seabury, 1979), 29–30;Google ScholarBorgman, Erik, “Negative Theology as Postmodern Talk of God,” Concilium 2 (1995): 102–11.Google Scholar
35 Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 103–4.Google Scholar
36 E.g., Griffiths, , The Marriage of East and West, 69–70.Google Scholar
37 Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 103.Google Scholar
38 Griffiths uses the phrase “unity in relationship” in “On Poverty and Simplicity: Views of a Post-Industrial Christian Sage,” interview by Weber, Renee, Revision 6/2 (Fall 1983): 27.Google Scholar For Griffiths the Trinity, as disclosed by Jesus' own experience and especially as interpreted in John's Gospel, reveals a depth of realization that goes beyond the undifferentiated oneness experienced in spiritual death and espoused as the highest spiritual goal by monistic systems. See his The New Creation in Christ, 22-23. His most extended reflection upon the Trinity is “A Meditation on the Mystery of the Trinity,” Monastic Studies 17 (Christmas 1986): 69–79.Google Scholar
39 Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 23.Google Scholar
40 Griffiths draws from the writings of John Ruusbroec on this point. See Griffiths', A New Vision of Reality, 247–50;Google Scholar cf. 172; Griffiths, Bede, River of Compassion: A Christian Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (Warwick, NY: Amity House, 1987), 101–3;Google ScholarTeasdale, Wayne, “Contemplative Community and the Transformation of the World,” interview (Shantivanam, India, 12 1986)Google Scholar, Living Prayer 22/1 (01–02 1989): 12.Google ScholarPubMed Cf. Tracy's contrasting of Eckhart, and Ruusbroec, in Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue (Louvain: Peeters/Eerdmans, 1990), 82–94.Google Scholar
41 Griffiths, , A New Vision of Reality, 250, 273.Google Scholar Griffiths was impressed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr's similar discussion of the spiritually awakened person's experience of “immediate symbols” in Nasr's, Knowledge and the Sacred, 200–1.Google Scholar Also see James Robertson Price's account of how images may again function within transcendence for the mature mystic in his “Transcendence and Images: The Apophatic and Kataphatic Reconsidered,” Studies in Formative Spirituality 11/2 (1990): 198–99.Google Scholar
42 On the need to go through Jesus to the Father, see Griffiths, , A New Vision of Reality, 250Google Scholar, and Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 22.Google Scholar Expressing the other aspect of the self's paradoxical relationship to the symbol of Jesus Christ, he said: “To me it's Jesus of Nazareth … you go deeper and deeper into his reality, and you find you don't lose him. He's found in the depths of his being which is the being of creation, which is the being of God. You go in and with him to the Supreme. You don't leave him” (Bede Griffiths, interview by the author, August 1991).
43 Griffiths, , “In Jesus' Name,” 499.Google Scholar
44 Griffiths, , A New Vision of Reality, 55–56;Google Scholar cf. 155. See also the meditation upon “Who Am I?” in his Return to the Center, chap. 4.
45 E.g., Griffiths, , “A Meditation on the Mystery of the Trinity,” 72.Google Scholar
46 Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Trask, Willard R. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 209–13.Google Scholar
47 Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 205, 207.Google Scholar
48 Eliade, , The Sacred and the Profane, 210.Google Scholar
49 Ibid.; and Eliade, Mircea, “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism” in Eliade, Mircea and Kitagawa, Joseph, eds., The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 103.Google Scholar
50 Eliade, , The Sacred and the Profane, 209–10;Google Scholar and Eliade, Mircea, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Sheed, Rosemary (Cleveland: World, 1963), 447.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., 477, 455. “[M]agico-religious experience makes it possible for man himself to be transformed into a symbol…. Man no longer feels himself to be an ‘air-tight’ fragment, but a living cosmos open to all the other living cosmoses by which he is surrounded” (455).
52 Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 80–83.Google Scholar
53 Eliade, , The Sacred and the Profane, 213.Google Scholar
54 Ricoeur, Paul, “Intellectual Autobiography” in Hahn, Lewis E., ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Chicago: Open Court, 1955), 17;Google Scholar see also 166-67, 454. For an account of the relative absence of considerations of symbols in Ricoeur's more recent thought as well as Ricoeur's own response to this account, see David Pellauer, “The Symbol Gave Rise to Thought,” and Ricoeur, Paul, “Reply to David Pellauer” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 99–125.Google Scholar
55 Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 54–63.Google Scholar
56 Ibid., 60-61; Ricoeur, , The Symbolism of Evil, 356Google Scholar: “Every symbol is finally a hierophany, a manifestation of the bond between man and the sacred.”
57 Ricoeur, Paul, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation” in Mudge, Lewis S., ed., Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 101, 102.Google Scholar In his account of the poetic character of biblical revelation, Ricoeur states: “My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject” (101). Connecting the poetic nature of biblical language with the notion of manifestation being developed here, he continues: “Here truth no longer means verification, but manifestation, i.e., letting what shows itself be. What shows itself in each instance is a proposed world, a world I may inhabit and wherein I can project my own most possibilities. It is in this sense of manifestation that language in its poetic function is a vehicle of revelation” (102). (Cf. Griffiths' view of poetic language, p. 219 above.) The statement that “truth” may be shown in the event of manifestation via the symbol is obviously controversial in that it implies that a knower is possible for such truth. Pellauer suggests, and Ricoeur agrees, that Kant's epistemology poses an unsurmountable qualification upon such claims by denying that something, including the sacred or even the cosmos, may be known in itself apart from the knower's own categories of thought. Pellauer thus notes that Ricoeur's statements on the truth represented by the symbol, and not so fully disclosed by the more limited nature of the metaphor, are affirmations rather than demonstrations (113-14, cf. Ricoeur's response, 125; see also Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology [New York: Seabury, 1978], 208–9Google Scholar). Recall Griffiths' critique of Kant, pp. 218-19 above.
58 Ricoeur, , The Symbolism of Evil, 348–49.Google Scholar
59 Ibid., 352. For Ricoeur, the task of interpretation assumes the loss of a first naivete toward the symbol and the experience of distance and estrangement from that symbol. “Interpretation,” he writes, “philosophically understood, is nothing else than an attempt to make estrangement and distanciation productive” (Interpretation Theory, 44). In specific relation to symbols, he notes, “[A] symbol is a double meaning linguistic expression that requires interpretation and interpretation is a work of understanding that aims at deciphering symbols” (Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Savage, Denis [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970], 9Google Scholar, quoted in Pellauer, , “The Symbol Gave Rise to Thought,” 104Google Scholar). Ricoeur also notes the effects of this deciphering of symbols upon self-understanding: “[I]nterpretation is the process by which disclosure of new modes of being … gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself” (Interpretation Theory, 94).
60 Ricoeur, , The Symbolism of Evil, 356.Google Scholar Ricoeur's philosophy of the self is based upon what he has called “a permanent distrust of the pretensions of the subject in posing itself as the foundation of its own meaning.” He continues: “Today this mistrust is reinforced by the conviction that the understanding of the self is always indirect and proceeds from the interpretation of signs given outside me in culture and history and from the appropriation of the meaning of these signs. I would now dare to say that, in the coming to understanding of signs inscribed in texts, the meaning rules and gives me a self” (Preface to Ihde, Don, Hermeneutical Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971], xvGoogle Scholar, quoted in Midge, , Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 9).Google Scholar See also Ricoeur, , Interpretation Theory, 93–94.Google Scholar The relationship between one's sense of self and one's sources of meaning, including religious symbols, is thus an intimate one for Ricoeur.
61 Tracy, , Blessed Rage for Order, 209.Google Scholar
62 Tracy, , Dialogue with the Other, 65–66.Google Scholar
63 Tracy, , The Analogical Imagination, 203–4;Google Scholar cf. Ricoeur, Paul, “Manifestation and Proclamation,” The Journal of the Blaisdell Institute 12 (Winter 1978).Google Scholar
64 Tracy, , The Analogical Imagination, 285–87;Google Scholar see also 203.
65 Ibid., 214, 217-18.
66 Ibid., 385-86.
67 E.g., Dialogue with the Other, 17-26, 95-123.
68 For a fuller list of the complementary terms within this dialectic, see Tracy's discussion of the all-important “and” between the terms that is especially characteristic of the “event” of Jesus Christ and thus of Christianity (The Analogical Imagination, 218).
69 Ibid., 435.
70 Griffiths, , The Marriage of East and West, 150–71.Google Scholar
71 Griffiths, , The New Creation in Christ, 51–52;Google ScholarGriffiths, , “In Jesus' Name,” 498–99.Google Scholar
72 Ibid., 498. Compare to Tracy's exposition of the central confession by means of which “Christians construe all reality anew,” including the self (Dialogue with the Other, 112).
73 Tracy, , The Analogical Imagination, 382.Google Scholar
74 Tracy, , Dialogue with the Other, 117–18.Google Scholar
75 Tracy, , The Analogical Imagination, 218.Google Scholar
76 Griffiths, Bede, “Transcending Dualism: An Eastern Approach to the Semitic Religions,” ed. Teasdale, Wayne, Cistercian Studies 20/2 (1985): 73–87.Google Scholar
77 For Griffiths' sense that he was given a path that others would follow in their relationship to religion, see his The Golden String, 13-14, 43-45. For his mature view of the relationship between the religions, see n. 27 above. For a similar sense that religions are moving toward recognition of their mutual interdependence within a greater whole, see Paul Knitter's discussion of “unitive pluralism” in his No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 7–16;Google ScholarWhitson, Robley, The Coming Convergence of World Religions (New York: Newman, 1971), 126.Google Scholar
78 Ricoeur, , The Symbolism of Evil, 347–57.Google Scholar Griffiths was more familiar with similar ideas expressed by Avery Dulles in his Models of Revelation.